Beverly has spent her life banishing romance, all that novelettish stuff.
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Disliking the novelettish type of subjects the company made, he left and, after an interlude in India, joined G.B. Samuelson as a scriptwriter.
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The High Command remained constricted by its novelettish story of murder, blackmail, and family secrets, but the verve of Dickinson's direction still shone through.
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Luminous and bold, elegant and elliptical, epic and novelettish, Cather's story reflects the paradoxes of the small town on the wild prairie of its setting, and of its pioneering author.
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Detractors may have called his approach novelettish and accused him of at least occasional mawkishness, but he was able to engage with audiences on a level that many, more timid, British directors of his era were not.
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This is a man who, while researching his novelettish tome, danced such obsequious attendance on the Queen that a helper at a hospice she was visiting took him for an equerry and asked if his employer needed the loo.
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Alfred > Hitchcock, 1940), Gaslight (d. Thorold Dickinson, 1940) and of course Gone > With The Wind (US, d. Victor Fleming, 1939) with a surprisingly distinctive > formula of its own, blending authentic star appeal (James Mason, Margaret > Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, the then newcomer Stewart Granger) with a plot > whose novelettish surface concealed an intricate labyrinth of contrasts and > doublings: good against evil, obedience against rebellion, male against > female and class against class. The ingredients of virtually all the > subsequent Gainsborough melodramas can be clearly seen taking root here.
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The Radio Times dismissed the film as "this doleful, overlong slice of surburban life": while Allmovie called it "a bitter half-hour anecdote stretched to 100 minutes...Intended as a slice of raw realism, Birthday Present plays more like a cautionary social studies film"; but TV Guide concluded, "All-around fine technical efforts add a sense of authenticity." The British Film Institute's Monthly Film Bulletin described the film as being "creditable" but "novelettish, and the problem handled and solved at a purely sentimental level".
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" David Lardner's review in The New Yorker dismissed the film, calling it "by no means a sample of the march of progress in the film world. The old version had Lon Chaney, who scared you plenty, and the new one has Claude Rains, who somehow doesn't." A review in the Monthly Film Bulletin stated that "rarely has a story so novelettish had such conscientious technical excellence lavished upon it" specifically noting that "it ranks among the screen's highest achievements in sound." The review continued that "The same careful effort-if not the same dazzling success-is apparent in casting, camera work, costuming and the numerous sets.
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The Stage review of the 2007 Orange Tree revival found that “the play-offers only a toff's eye of Britain at war” with a live-in servant and “a cellar full of claret, even if Spam fritters are on the menu.” This was also brought out forcefully by Richard Winnington in his devastating but still relevant film review (News Chronicle, London, 25 May. 1946). He calls Compton Bennett's film "a poor and empty adaptation of a poor and empty play" which “enshrines the worst characteristics of the British film, and condones the worst qualities of the least representative section of the British race.” Chiding the producers, Sydney Box and his sister Betty, who also wrote the screenplay, he describes it as a "novelettish distortion" of a contemporary problem. “Alas’’ he continues, “the note is one of genteel reverence.
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